Your Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Sandwiches Have a Hefty Carbon Footprint

Most people know that eating meat, especially red meat—say, hamburgers—is bad for the environment. Raising enough methane-farting, resource-intensive cows to satisfy our cravings for burgers and steaks produces an outsized carbon footprint that plays a significant role in climate change. But what about your breakfast egg-and-cheese? A new study says you should feel guilty about that, too.

Recent findings reported in the journal Sustainable Production and Consumption examine the carbon footprint of 40 different kinds of sandwiches—from the simple ham and cheese to tuna, BLTs, and breakfast sandwiches—both homemade and pre-packaged. Researchers from the University of Manchester calculated the carbon necessary to produce standard recipes, including the agriculture required for the ingredients, the manufacturing of the packaging materials, the refrigeration required to keep the sandwiches cold, and the waste generated. They sourced their estimates from previous studies on the carbon footprint of producing and transporting ingredients like bread, ham, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and canned tuna as well as the energy cost of manufacturing packaging, transporting materials, and taking waste to the landfill.

They found that of all the sandwiches, those that combined pork (or prawns, because prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches are apparently a popular thing) and cheese are the most carbon-intensive. A bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich clocked in as the most environmentally taxing sandwich of them all, with a carbon footprint of 1441 grams CO2 equivalent—a measurement of the global warming potential—per sandwich. (The diet of the average meat-eater in the UK produces about 7200 grams CO2 equivalent daily. For comparison, if you drive your car four miles, it emits about 1650 grams CO2, roughly.)

Chicken and tuna sandwiches were slightly less carbon-intensive, but vegetarian sandwiches didn't fare as well as you might think—depending on how much and what type of cheese was involved, they could have carbon footprints as high as some of the meat sandwiches.

The researchers suggest that some improvements to the way sandwiches are produced and sold might decrease their carbon footprint by as much as 50 percent. Reducing the amount of meat, eggs, and cheese used, excluding tomato, lettuce, or mayo, reducing packaging, and other changes could all contribute to shrinking a sandwich's carbon footprint. Unfortunately, here's a limit to how much a sandwich's environmental impact can be reduced. You can't really have a BLT without the B, L, or T.

But if you're making it instead of buying it, you're saving a lot of emissions. As you might expect given the environmental cost of packaging, ready-made commercial sandwiches had a much bigger carbon footprint than their homemade counterparts containing the same ingredients—2.2 times larger, in fact.

Just another reason to feel guilty about not bringing your own lunch from home.

Dumbo octopuses are named for the elephant-ear-like fins they use to navigate the deep sea, but until recently, when and how they developed those floppy appendages were a mystery. Now, for the first time, researchers have caught a newborn Dumbo octopus on tape. As reported in the journal Current Biology, they discovered that the creatures are equipped with the fins from the moment they hatch.

Study co-author Tim Shank, a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, spotted the octopus in 2005. During a research expedition in the North Atlantic, one of the remotely operated vehicles he was working with collected several coral branches with something strange attached to them. It looked like a bunch of sandy-colored golf balls at first, but then he realized it was an egg sac.

He and his fellow researchers eventually classified the hatchling that emerged as a member of the genus Grimpoteuthis. In other words, it was a Dumbo octopus, though they couldn't determine the exact species. But you wouldn't need a biology degree to spot its resemblance to Disney's famous elephant, as you can see in the video below.

The octopus hatched with a set of functional fins that allowed it to swim around and hunt right away, and an MRI scan revealed fully-developed internal organs and a complex nervous system. As the researchers wrote in their study, Dumbo octopuses enter the world as "competent juveniles" ready to jump straight into adult life.

Grimpoteuthis spends its life in the deep ocean, which makes it difficult to study. Scientists hope the newly-reported findings will make it easier to identify Grimpoteuthis eggs and hatchlings for future research.

Why stop at bringing your own grocery bags to the store? One London grocery wants you to BYO-Tupperware. The London Evening Standardreports that a UK chain called Planet Organic has partnered with Unpackaged—a company dedicated to sustainable packaging—to install self-serve bulk-food dispensers where customers can fill their own reusable containers with dry goods, cutting down on plastic packaging waste.

To use the system, customers walk up and weigh their empty container at a self-serve station, printing and attaching a label with its tare weight. Then, they can fill it with flour, nuts, or other kinds of dry goods, weigh it again, and print the price tag before taking it up to the check out. (Regular customers only have to weigh their containers once, since they can save the peel-off label to use again next time.)

Planet Organic is offering cereals, legumes, grains, nuts, chocolate, dried fruit, and even some cleaning products in bulk as part of this program, significantly reducing the amount of waste shoppers would otherwise be taking home on each grocery trip.

Zero-waste grocery stores have been popping up in Europe for several years. These shops, like Berlin's Original Unverpackt, don't offer any bags or containers, asking customers bring their own instead. This strategy also encourages people to buy only what they need, which eliminates food waste—there's no need to buy a full 5-pound bag of flour if you only want to make one cake.

The concept is also gaining traction in North America. The no-packaging grocery store in.gredients opened in Austin, Texas in 2011. The Brooklyn store Package Free, opened in 2017, takes the idea even further, marketing itself as a one-stop shop for "everything that you'd need to transition to a low waste lifestyle." It sells everything from tote bags to laundry detergent to dental floss.